Reassessing the Role of Credit in Late Colonial Peru: Censos, Escrituras, and Imposiciones

Abstract

This work was made possible by support from the Centro de Formaci6n del Banco de Espania, a Fulbright-Hays grant, the American Philosophical Society, and the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY. For their invaluable comments I am grateful to Kenneth J. Andrien, David A. Brading, Arnold J. Bauer, Noble David Cook, Reinhard Liehr, Rory Miller, Richard J. Salvucci, Mark D. Szuchman, and the HAHR's anonymous external evaluators. Research for this essay utilized the following archives: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI); Archivo General de la Naci6n, Lima (AGN); Archivo Hist6rico Arzobispal de Lima (AAL); Archivo Hist6rico Nacional, Madrid (AHN); Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (BNM); and Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, Lima (BNP). i. Asunci6n Lavrin, Role of Nunneries in the Economy of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century, HAHR 46:4 (Nov. 1966), 371-93; Michael Costeloe, Wealth in Mexico: A Study of the Juzgado de Capellanias in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800-1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967); Brian Hamnett, Appropriation of Mexican Wealth by the Spanish Bourbon Government: The 'Consolidaci6n de Vales Reales,' 1805-1809, Journal of Latin American Studies 1 (i968), 85-113, and Church Wealth in Peru: Estates and Loans in the Archdiocese of Lima in the Seventeenth Century, Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft, und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas io (Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 1973), 113-32; Arnold J. Bauer, and Spanish American Agrarian Structure, 1765-1865, The Americas 28 (1971), 78-98, and in the Economy of Spanish America: Censos and Dep6sitos in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, HAHR 63:4 (Nov. 1983), 707-33. 2. Linda Greenow, Dimensions of the Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century Nueva Galicia, in Social Fabric and Spatial Structure in Colonial Latin America, ed. David Robinson (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1979), 227-79, and Credit and Socioeconomic Change in Colonial Mexico: Loans and Mortgages in Guadalajara, 1720-1820 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983); Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-